JAMES AGEE CINEMA CIRCLE

'Criticism is the only thing that stands between the audience and advertising.' - Pauline Kael

WHO WE ARE

Dr David Archibald, University Of GlasgowFilm International, Financial Times, Cineaste

Steve Ashton,Filmvision.netLiza Bear, Bomb Magazine

Dan BessieFilmmaker and Culture Critic

Prof. Dennis BroeJump Cut, NY Newsday, Boston Phoenix

Dianne BrooksThe Film Files, Writemovies.com

Paul BuhleBrown University

Lisa CollinsFilmmaker

Benjamin DickensonBright Lights Film Journal, UK

David EhrensteinQuarterly Review of Film and Video

Miguel GardelProletaria Press

Michael HaasCulture critic

Laura HaddenPacifica Radio

Gerald HorneUniversity Of Houston

Reynold HumphriesBritish Film Historian

Sikivu HutchinsonBlackFemsLens.org, KPFK Radio

Jan Lisa HuttnerTheHotPinkPen.com, Films For Two

Cindy LuciaCineaste Magazine

Pat McGilliganFilm Historian

Prairie MillerWBAI/Pacifica National Radio Network

Logan NakyanziGo Left TV, Huffington Post

Victor NavaskyThe Nation

Gerald PearyBoston Phoenix

Steve PresenceRadical Film Network, UK

Louis ProyectCounterpunch, Marxmail.org

Luis ReyesFilm historian

Nancy Schiesari,

BBC, Channel 4,

Univ. of Texas, Austin

Rebecca SchillerCulture Critic

Michael Slate

Beneath The Surface, KPFK RadioDavid Spaner, Arsenal Pulp Press

Christopher TrumboRIP, January 8, 2011

Dave WagnerMother Jones, Film InternationalLinda ZLFC Film Club

Noah ZweigTelesur

Paul Robeson With Oakland, Ca. Shipyard Workers, 1942

Black August

So in order to best cover all bases, progressive film critics tend to consider three categories of assessment, rather than two: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The first two are self-explanatory. And the third category is reserved for movies that may have been impressively put together, but there's just something offensively anti-humanistic about them.

Stay tuned......

The Organizer

Wednesday, December 31, 2014

In case you're wondering why all those critics groups and movie guild organizations out there seem to inevitably choose the same awards as one another every year from a small field of contestants, there's an obvious - and odious - reason. Hollywood strictly controls who and what gets nominated, simply by making available as awards screenings or screeners, only those films, filmmakers and actors they choose as the winners - and ignoring any other requests. Not so with the James Agee Cinema Circle, defying those financially controlled, bought and paid for bogus awards, with our yearly JACC Anti-Oscars.

And with Oscar wins based - no less than US multi-million dollar election victories - on who can afford to buy elections with the biggest bucks, The James Agee Cinema Circle has announced their Anti-Oscars 2014, in recognition of artistic merit and humanistic values alone. In other words, unlike the Academy, which primarily focuses on entertainment or sensationalism while disregarding debasement targeting race, gender and class, the James Agee Cinema Circle bestows awards on all entries equally each year. And the only losers are relegated to their JACC Hall Of Shame.

With their citing of late iconic film critic Pauline Kael that 'Criticism is the only thing that stands between the audience and advertising,' the Critics Chapter of JACC is described as 'an association of national and international critics, historians and film scholars who are involved in print, radio, online and TV broadcast media and analysis.'

'We have come together to form the first progressive critics organization, in the belief that idealistic perspectives, voices and diverse ideological visions in film criticism that speak with social conviction and consciousness, are sorely lacking as a public platform. We will be recognizing films embodying those humanistic ideals with our annual awards.

There are so many reasons for liking or hating a movie. One big mental roadblock is being knocked out by the performances, dramatic style or cinematography, but evaluating the story as a stinker. And the typical entertainment journalist and those for sale to the commercial media corporations, will argue that if a movie is well made, it doesn't matter if the content is reactionary, degrades, or dehumanizes, or even if it is disseminating untruths about real political and historical events.

But as JACC has so succinctly pointed out, why go to such lengths to lie, when you can just simply tell the truth. And that 'why' will be one of our many probing hot topics on the table.

So in order to best cover all bases, progressive film critics tend to consider three categories of assessment, rather than two: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The first two are self-explanatory. And the third category is reserved for movies that may have been impressively put together, but there's just something offensively anti-humanistic about them.'

The ANTI-OSCARS 2014: THE JAMES AGEE CINEMA CIRCLE AWARDS

*THE TRUMBO: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURE is named after Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned for his beliefs and refusing to inform. Trumbo helped break the Blacklist when he received screen credit for "Spartacus" and "Exodus" in 1960.*KILL THE MESSENGER: One of the only biopics this year not twisting truths through either falsification or omission, this Michael Cuesta directed docudrama heralds the courageous, defiant, lonely and tragic struggle of journalist Gary Webb, who stood up to both the US government and corporate media in collusion. As he exposed the CIA scheme to flood the inner cities with cocaine back in the 1990s to covertly finance the illegal US-backed Contra war against the Nicaraguan Sandinistas.

*THE GARFIELD: The Award for BEST ACTOR is named after John Garfield, who rose from the proletarian theatre to star in progressive pictures such as "Gentleman's Agreement" and "Force of Evil," only to run afoul of the Hollywood Blacklist.

*JEREMY RENNER: KILL THE MESSENGER

*KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For BEST ACTRESS Named for Karen Morley, who was driven out of Hollywood in the 1930s for her leftist views, but who maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.*KRISTEN STEWART, CAMP X-RAY

*THE RENOIR: The Award for BEST ANTI-WAR FILM is named after the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who directed the 1937 anti-militarism masterpiece, "Grand Illusion."*CAMP X-RAY

*THE GILLO: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FOREIGN FILM is named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who lensed the 1960s classics "The Battle of Algiers" and "Burn!"*TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

*THE DZIGA: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE DOCUMENTARY is named after the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who directed 1920s nonfiction films such as the "Kino Pravda" ("Film Truth") series and "The Man With the Movie Camera."

*THE INTERNET'S OWN BOY: THE STORY OF AARON SWARTZ

*THE BOUND FOR GLORY AWARD: The Award for BEST ANTI-CAPITALIST FILM is named after the 1976 Hal Ashby directed biopic about Woody Guthrie, played by the late David Carradine.*FOXCATCHER*LA PASSIONARA AWARD: For the most positive female images in a movie, and in light of the historically demeaning portrayal of women in movies.*MARION COTILLARD: TWO DAYS, ONE NIGHT

*OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD: For the most positive and inspiring working class images in movies this year.*CESAR CHAVEZ

*THE ROBESON AWARD: Named after courageous performing legend, Paul Robeson. The award is for the movie that best expresses the people of color experience, in light of their historically demeaning portrayals in films.*KILL THE MESSENGER

*THE TOMAS GUTIERREZ ALEA AWARD: Named after the late legendary Cuban filmmaker. For best depicting mass popular uprising or revolutionary transformation in movies*SNOWPIERCER

*THE LAWSON: The Award for BEST ANTI-FASCIST FILM this year, is named after screenwriter John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten, who wrote Hollywood's first feature about the Spanish Civil War, 1938's "Blockade," with Henry Fonda, and anti-Nazi movies such as 1943's "Sahara," starring Humphrey Bogart.*NO GOD, NO MASTER

*THE MODERN TIMES: The Award for Best Progressive Film SATIRE is named after Charlie Chaplin, who made 1936's "Modern Times" and 1940's "The Great Dictator."*MISS MEADOWS

*THE ORSON: The Award for BEST OVERLOOKED OR THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED [seen at festivals, or on TV or DVD only] Progressive Film is named after actor/director Orson Welles. After he directed the masterpiece "Citizen Kane" Welles had difficulty getting most of his other movies made.

*JIMMY'S HALL: Directed by Ken Loach, Jimmy Hall dramatically recounts the suppression and politically motivated persecution of Irish left activist Jimmy Gralton, the only person ever deported, and driven into exile for his ideology, by Ireland. And yes, you probably never heard of him.

*RUNNER UP: MUGABE: VILLAIN OR HERO?

*THE SERGEI: The Award for Best Progressive LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT PROGRESSIVE ACTIVIST is named after the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who created Russian revolutionary classics such as 1925's "Potemkin" and 1927's "10 Days That Shook the World."*HARRY BELAFONTE: for a lifetime of principled activism. When Belafonte recently received an honorary Oscar, he said: "To be rewarded by my peers for my work in human rights and civil rights and for peace … it powerfully mutes the enemy's thunder."

*BEST MOVIE LINES:

"I make things up for a living. I'm a reporter." - Danny Huston in BIG EYES.

"They came into this country with no visas, no passports, no invitations. And with syphilis and gonorrhea between their legs, they consumed us, they consumed our resources. They consumed our minerals, our land.' - MUGABE: VILLAIN OR HERO?

*THE MASSES ARE MORONS. AKA POVERTY PORN: In other words, do actors really have to look so dumb and stumble over their words or behave primitively in the extreme, when impersonating proletarians in movies?*GOD'S POCKET

*THE MILITARY HOLLYWOOD COMPLEX CITATION: Special citation inaugurating Hollywood's new role engaging in corporate terrorism in collusion with the US government, by making a movie to hopefully bring down a foreign government.

*THE INTERVIEW

*ELIA KAZAN TOP TEN HALL OF SHAME 2014: Citations for the worst anti-workingclass and right wing movies of the year is named after director Elia Kazan, who was Hollywood's 'King Rat.' Kazan not only informed on accused radicals to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he took out a New York Times ad justifying his self-serving treachery.

AMERICAN SNIPER
GONE GIRL
I ORIGINS
NIGHTCRAWLER
NIGHT MOVES
SIN CITY
THE GIVER
THE INTERVIEW
THE PURGE: ANARCHY
ZERO MOTIVATION

Thursday, December 25, 2014

**Socialist Realism at the Moscow Lumiere Brothers Center For
Photography: Media Acheology, Industrial Aesthetics, Cultural Shifts. Curator Zueva Ekaterina phones in from Moscow to Arts
Express to discuss the exhibit there. Shedding light on a new and
different relationship of workers to their labor during the Soviet era
captured via the camera's eye, and minus capitalism and the profit
motive. Additional topics on the table include how Russians view ongoing
hostilities between our two countries and the Ukraine crisis, and
Snowden's exile there. Also weighing in on these related issues is The X
File's FBI Agent Dana Scully - aka Gillian Anderson. As the actress
uncovers in a very different BBC episode investigation, Karl Marx's
theory of worker alienation still valid today.

**Revisiting the Vietnam Anti-War Music Scene: As the 40th anniversary of that revolutionary victory approaches next month, Steal This Radio's Mitchel Cohen delves into the mass movement music that defined that turbulent moment in time, through the songs and conversation with the late activist troubadour, Phil Ochs. And music that is no less relevant today, in the continued warring of the US on the planet.

**Bluebird: A dramatic feature fusion of regional filmmaking with economic crisis cinema. Tabulating the economic and emotional toll on workers in a rural Maine logging town, struggling for survival and dignity. A commentary.

Arts Express, airing on WBAI Radio in NY archived at wbai.org, and on the Pacifica National Radio Network.

Saturday, December 20, 2014

Golden Age of Hollywood's social activist screen goddess Luise Rainer
just passed away at the age of 104. And, who is said to have used her
Oscars as doorstops. Film historian David Spaner reports from
Vancouver. LISTEN TO THE DISCUSSION HERE

David Spaner is a Vancouver based film critic. He is a member of the James Agee Cinema Circle.

Wednesday, December 10, 2014

The veteran British director of Deliverance, Point Blank and Hell In The Pacific with his own personal and political take on Korean conflict, and a war movie without war. And UK military bureaucracy ranging from nasty to nonsensical. Don't expect The Interview.

Also, Rembrandt Event Cinema: The influence of bare churches, the brutality of art flung on the marketplace, and the advent of self portraits to the dubious selfie today. Along with the unique perspective of art in cinema, simultaneously capturing the painter's eye, the human eye and the camera's eye. Listen To The Show Here

Arts Express, airing on WBAI Radio in NY archived at wbai.org, and on the Pacifica National Radio Network.

Saturday, January 18, 2014

With Oscar wins based - no less than US multi-million dollar election victories - on who can afford to buy elections with the biggest bucks, The James Agee Cinema Circle has announced their Anti-Oscars, in recognition of artistic merit and humanistic values alone. In other words, unlike the Academy, which primarily focuses on entertainment or sensationalism while disregarding debasement targeting race, gender and class, the James Agee Cinema Circle bestows awards on all entries equally each year. And the only losers are relegated to their JACC Hall Of Shame.

With their citing of late iconic film critic Pauline Kael that 'Criticism is the only thing that stands between the audience and advertising,' the Critics Chapter of JACC is described as 'an association of national and international critics, historians and film scholars who are involved in print, radio, online and TV broadcast media and analysis.'

'We have come together to form the first progressive critics organization, in the belief that idealistic perspectives, voices and diverse ideological visions in film criticism that speak with social conviction and consciousness, are sorely lacking as a public platform. We will be recognizing films embodying those humanistic ideals with our annual awards.

There are so many reasons for liking or hating a movie. One big mental roadblock is being knocked out by the performances, dramatic style or cinematography, but evaluating the story as a stinker. And the typical entertainment journalist and those for sale to the commercial media corporations, will argue that if a movie is well made, it doesn't matter if the content is reactionary, degrades, or dehumanizes, or even if it is disseminating untruths about real political and historical events.

But as JACC has so succinctly pointed out, why go to such lengths to lie, when you can just simply tell the truth. And that 'why' will be one of our many probing hot topics on the table.

So in order to best cover all bases, progressive film critics tend to consider three categories of assessment, rather than two: The Good, The Bad and The Ugly. The first two are self-explanatory. And the third category is reserved for movies that may have been impressively put together, but there's just something offensively anti-humanistic about them.'

The Anti-Oscars 2013: The James Agee Cinema Circle Challenges The Academy Awards

*THE TRUMBO: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE PICTURE is named after Oscar-winning screenwriter Dalton Trumbo, a member of the Hollywood Ten, who was imprisoned for his beliefs and refusing to inform. Trumbo helped break the Blacklist when he received screen credit for "Spartacus" and "Exodus" in 1960.

*12 YEARS A SLAVE

*THE GARFIELD: The Award for BEST ACTOR is named after John Garfield, who rose from the proletarian theatre to star in progressive pictures such as "Gentleman's Agreement" and "Force of Evil," only to run afoul of the Hollywood Blacklist.

*CHIWETEL EJIOFOR, 12 YEARS A SLAVE

*KAREN MORLEY AWARD: For BEST ACTRESS Named for Karen Morley, who was driven out of Hollywood in the 1930s for her leftist views, but who maintained her militant political activism for the rest of her life, running for Lieutenant Governor on the American Labor Party ticket in 1954. She passed away in 2003, unrepentant to the end, at the age of 93.

*JENNIFER HUDSON, WINNIE MANDELA

*THE RENOIR: The Award for BEST ANTI-WAR FILM is named after the great French filmmaker Jean Renoir, who directed the 1937 anti-militarism masterpiece, "Grand Illusion."

*EMPEROR

*THE GILLO: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE FOREIGN FILM is named after the Italian director Gillo Pontecorvo, who lensed the 1960s classics "The Battle of Algiers" and "Burn!"

*COMRADE KIM GOES FLYING

*THE DZIGA: The Award for BEST PROGRESSIVE DOCUMENTARY is named after the Soviet filmmaker Dziga Vertov, who directed 1920s nonfiction films such as the "Kino Pravda" ("Film Truth") series and "The Man With the Movie Camera."

*THE ACT OF KILLING

*THE BOUND FOR GLORY AWARD: The Award for BEST ANTI-CAPITALIST FILM is named after the 1976 Hal Ashby directed biopic about Woody Guthrie, played by the late David Carradine.

*NEBRASKA

*LA PASSIONARA AWARD: For the most positive female images in a movie, and in light of the historically demeaning portrayal of women in movies.

*INCH'ALLAH

*OUR DAILY BREAD AWARD: For the most positive and inspiring working class images in movies this year.

*THE HAPPY POET

*THE ROBESON AWARD: Named after courageous performing legend, Paul Robeson. The award is for the movie that best expresses the people of color experience, in light of their historically demeaning portrayals in films.

*FREE ANGELA DAVIS AND ALL POLITICAL PRISONERS

*THE TOMAS GUTIERREZ ALEA AWARD: Named after the late legendary Cuban filmmaker. For best depicting mass popular uprising or revolutionary transformation in movies

*ASSAULT ON WALL STREET

*THE LAWSON: The Award for BEST ANTI-FASCIST FILM this year, is named after screenwriter John Howard Lawson, one of the Hollywood Ten, who wrote Hollywood's first feature about the Spanish Civil War, 1938's "Blockade," with Henry Fonda, and anti-Nazi movies such as 1943's "Sahara," starring Humphrey Bogart.

*DIRTY WARS

*THE MODERN TIMES: The Award for Best Progressive Film SATIRE is named after Charlie Chaplin, who made 1936's "Modern Times" and 1940's "The Great Dictator."

*DON JON*THE ORSON: The Award for BEST OVERLOOKED OR THEATRICALLY UNRELEASED [seen at festivals, or on TV or DVD only] Progressive Film is named after actor/director Orson Welles. After he directed the masterpiece "Citizen Kane" Welles had difficulty getting most of his other movies made.

*MEDIASTAN

*THE PASOLINI: The Award for Best PRO-GAY Film is named after Italian director Pier Paolo Pasolini, who directed 1964's "The Gospel According to St. Matthew" and "The Decameron" and "The Canterbury Tales" in the 1970s.

*DALLAS BUYERS CLUB

*THE SERGEI: The Award for Best Progressive LIFETIME ACHIEVEMENT PROGRESSIVE ACTIVIST is named after the Soviet filmmaker Sergei Eisenstein, who created Russian revolutionary classics such as 1925's "Potemkin" and 1927's "10 Days That Shook the World."

*LAURA POITRAS: The director of My Country, My Country and The Oath. For bringing the Edward Snowden NSA revelations to light when others knew but feared to do so, driven into exile in Germany for doing just that, and currently making a documentary about it.

*WORST QUOTE OF THE YEAR: RED 2: "Never let the truth get in the way of a good story." - Erich Hoeber, screenwriter

*THE MASSES ARE MORONS. AKA POVERTY PORN: In other words, do actors really have to look so dumb and stumble over their words or behave primitively in the extreme, when impersonating proletarians in movies?

*Out Of The Furnace

*ELIA KAZAN HALL OF SHAME 2013: Citations for the worst anti-workingclass and right wing movies of the year is named after director Elia Kazan, who was Hollywood's 'King Rat.' Kazan not only informed on accused radicals to the House Un-American Activities Committee, he took out a New York Times ad justifying his self-serving treachery.

Doonby
Gangster Squad
Inside Llewyn Davis
Jobs
Lone Survivor
Out Of The Furnace
Saving Mr. Banks
The Butler
The Company You Keep
The East
The Fifth Estate
The Invisible Woman
The Past
We Steal Secrets

Friday, April 19, 2013

JACC Film Critic Louis Proyect Sounds Off Against De Niro's Tribeca Film Festival: 'I'm Talkin' To You!'

Hey Bobby,

This morning I went down to the Clearview Chelsea Theater for a 9:30
press screening for a documentary on herring fishermen. I got up early
just to make it there on time. My guess is that I probably would be the
only person attending.

Anyhow, I stopped at the table in the lobby to check in but was told
that I was not in the database. That didn’t surprise me since I never
applied for press credentials. As a blogger (but with 650 film reviews
on Rotten Tomatoes), I figured that I would not pass muster.

But I had been invited by the film’s publicist to attend the screening.
Even though she vouched for me, I was still not admitted. It was a
“security issue” they told me, as if I was concealing a pressure cooker
bomb. When I told them “Fuck you and fuck the Tribeca Film Festival”,
the off-duty cop serving as a security guard got up from his chair with
his hand on his gun to tell me to shut up. I said that since there is no
law against telling someone to fuck off, he should sit back down.

If I ever run into you on the street, Bobby, I am going to tell you this
to your face. With your fucking connections to Jonathan Tisch and your
idiotic red tape and your bourgeois red carpets, you can take your
fucking film festival and stick it up your ass.

Yours truly,
Louis Proyect

Louis Proyect is film editor at Counterpunch, and he writes cinema criticism and commentary at louisproyect.wordpress.com and marxmail.org.

Sunday, August 12, 2012

For women who commit their lives to mass struggle, there is always a
choice that men never have to make. Namely to sacrifice the option of
motherhood for revolutionary struggle.

But for many of the young
women who joined the Revolutionary Left Movement [MIR, Movimiento de
Izquierda Revolucionaria] coalition in Chile to rise up against the 1973
bloody repressive coup by General Augusto Pinochet against the
Socialist government of Salvador Allende, the choice did not exist.

And
as fiercely committed young mothers already fugitives deep into
the revolutionary resistance, they were not only torn between the
political and personal in ways men never confront. But the parents of
these offspring were also faced with the ruthless policy of the
CIA-backed Pinochet regime of engaging in the kidnapping of their
children as a negotiation tactic to force the surrender of these hunted
revolutionaries. Along with the now well documented horrific secret
adoptions of those children of the many subsequently slaughtered
political martyrs in question.

And the documentary The Chilean
Building [El Edificio De Los Chilenos] not only resurrects the
simultaneous heartbreaking and inspiring buried history of those
children hidden away in other countries by their parents for their
safety. But achieves a rare intensity as well, chronicling that
turbulent time. Because the filmmaker Macarena Aguilo, just happens to
be one of those children back then, who surmounted the enormous
challenges of that time.

Kidnapped and disappeared by the CIA
when just a preschooler as an unsuccessful bargaining chip to force the
surrender of her father in hiding, Macarena was released a month later.
But fearful for her future, her father arranged for Macarena to be
reunited with her mother already in exile in France. And eventually
Macarena joined scores of other politically at-risk Chilean children at a
commune set up for them in Havana. Which came to be known as the
Chilean Building.

Winner of the Best Documentary at the New York International Latino
Film Festival last year, The Chilean Building is an alternately euphoric
and solemn collective recollection by many of those young spunky
survivors and their parents and fellow comrade guardians, of the
'tremendous invitation' that welcomed them in Cuba. And the unique
experience of a society where 'everything Cuba does is for everyone,'
and every house belongs to everybody,' in 'a good place for children,
because everyone loves them.'

Yet at the same time, the
emotionally tragic truth for which neither the children nor parents have
been able to achieve closure to this day. Namely, the utopian political
dream tasted in Cuba - of a society dissociated from 'consumption,
individualism and competition for money.' But necessitating the enormous
personal sacrifices of those Chilean parents and children, that in the
end left all their lives personally damaged, and bereft of an
anticipated legacy that has never been realized in Chile.

The
Chilean Building is an impassioned recollection of intimate and
collective memory, through difficult testimony, and heartbroken yet
politically resolute letters written by parents to their children from
afar through those years, and the grown children today who sublimate
those traumatic feelings through healing art. Along with moments of
tender humor, as when one of them recalls with delight as an only child,
being suddenly surrounded by sixty new siblings. And another expressing
relief - perhaps regarding his own anticipation of parenthood in a very
different, disillusioning world in Chile today - that in the Chilean
Building in Cuba, 'I didn't have television to screw up my head.'

And
a mother's letter in particular written back then, magnifies and
solidifies the sustained resilience of Macarena and those other young
hearts and minds:

'Tomorrow you shall begin a path with many
other children, and you'll have the loving hands of our comrades to
carry you forward. If there's anything I wanted to give you and learn
with you, it is to live intensely, to love with your eyes. With a desire
to feel and to always move forward, trying to stay true to what we've
said. And if I leave you today, it's because that small, honest
commitment I gave you urges many of us, hopefully thousands, to go
struggle with our comrades in Chile...And that victory shall be for you,
for all the children of Chile.'

And no matter what the
outcome, in a brokenhearted parent's explanation for the hopefully
comprehending mind of a child, it was about a time of 'such monumental
craziness, but we tried to do it well. We tried to do everything with
our hearts.'

Candid and ironic, replete with raw feelings yet
never truly defeatist, The Chilean Building vividly poses solemn
questions about the price of struggle, but without ever quite
relinquishing political hope. And as one can glean in tentative but
miraculous ways as legacy, beyond the scope of this movie, such as in
the case of Spanish judge, lawyer, and international jurist,
Baltasar Garzón. Who leads the legal team representing Wikileaks and
Julian Assange, currently seeking political asylum holed up for months
in the Ecuadorian embassy in London, fighting anticipated US
prosecution.

Garzón in fact, revolutionized the international
justice system two decades ago by issuing an arrest warrant for
Pinochet for crimes against humanity in Chile. For which Pinochet was
never in fact brought to justice, but Garzón's actions spearheaded the
fight against such impunity in Latin America, and the rest of the world.

The
Chilean Building is being released theatrically at The Maysles Cinema
in NYC, August 13th through 19th - a Harlem theater devoted to the
recognition of documentary film. More information is online at:

Friday, August 3, 2012

I’m Dennis Broe and this is deep summer, a time when, with blockbusters seemingly the only thing to watch, some people stop going to movies. And some people go to movies and start opening fire. I don’t want to say there is a direct link between the very dark sentiments which Warner’s has unleashed in this Batman trilogy and the horrible incident at the opening but while the Dark Knight series--with its open advocacy of vigilante violence, its canniness in bringing childhood trauma into the psyche of the villains like Heath Ledger’s Joker but at the same time its irresponsibility in refusing to trace the roots of that trauma, and its validation of the allure of personal weaponry as in the second part’s romantic representation of the Batmobile storming out of the batcave and down the streets of Gotham as paralleling the US convoys storming out of the emerald city in Baghdad--seems willy nilly to be unleashing a storm of negativity with no thought about the consequences except at the box office and the consequences may have caught up with the series.

There is also, by the way, every reason to believe that Warner’s may end up benefitting from the incident, with a film that was destined to be the main topic of conversation on weekends now becoming the main topic of conversation all week long and with domestic earnings, where the film was supposed to have trouble, placing it as the third largest opening of all time and the largest non-3D opening. Christopher Nolan claims the series is not political, that he is just randomly picking up elements of the society and tossing them in the stew, but that argument assumes that the society that he so intuitively grasps is not political, that it is not a society that is greedier, more desperate and more despairing as it is failing, all qualities that the Dark Knight series registers but refuses to analyze and thus contributes itself to pushing the greed, despair and desperation.

That the opening night, real-life, villain was from a town near Columbine again also reinforces Michael Moore’s point that personal violence is linked to social violence in a society that leads the world in the manufacture and sale of armaments, and in a town which is one of the loci of those corporate sales, since Raytheon, the third largest US weapons manufacturer has a major plant there. Indeed, the assassin, though he claims to be the like the Joker, is actually closer to Bruce Wayne in his personal assembly of public weaponry.

(Footnote, last fall one Saturday I was trying to get to Zucotti Park to visit the Occupy Movement and people were having to circumnavigate the park because there was filming going on. At first, I innocently thought it might be a director making a film about the Occupy Movement and when I asked what was being shot the production people, presumably a little guilty about the interference, would not say. I finally discovered that it was the Dark Knight who, rather than being on the side of the people, was instead on the side of our own Commissioner Gordon and the NYPD, not in fighting crime on Wall Street but in preventing people from taking part in the movement to fight crime there. I think that says something about which side of the 1/99% divide Batman’s brand of vigilante justice comes down on.

Now to less fascist, more pleasant, and, indeed, more resistant, late summer cinema. Since it is summer download, rental season, have I got some downloads for you, courtesy of the French Cinematheque in Paris which is in the process of wrapping a series on a director who is truly the king of the B’s, Edgar Ulmer. It’s safe to say that no director has ever worked in so many different kinds of off-Hollywood production modes over such a long period, persistently either refusing or being refused by the major studios.

The output also really varies. The ‘30s and early ‘40s films are a fascinating melange, ranging from public interest melodramas like the very startling Damaged Lives (1933) where a corporate wonderboy for a wedding present, albeit unwittingly, gives his bride syphilis to race movies like Moon Over Harlem (1939) at the end of the Harlem Renaissance where Ulmer keeps pace with African American director Oscar Micheaux is presenting a slice of Harlem life complete with a villainous figure named “Wall Street,” to Yiddish musical dramas like the shtetl slice-of –life-in-the-fields numbers in The Singing Blacksmith (1938), to Ukranian operas, like Cossacks In Exile (1938) shot on the sly at night on the steppes of, not Siberia, but Winnipeg.

The ‘40s to the mid-‘50s were his Hollywood genre period, where Ulmer all but ran the Poverty Row Studio PRC. They consisted of: what many still feel is the founding text of that permutation of the crime film, called the film noir, Detour (1945); women’s melodrama like the underrated Strange Woman with, it is said Ulmer being the only director who ever got Hedy Lamarr to act in this case as a woman whose desire outstrips the narrow confines of her new England town; social melodrama such as the excellent Ruthless (1948) , which is after The Strange Love of Martha Ivers (1946), perhaps the sharpest examination of the brutality of a postwar capitalist competitiveness and which ends with the two lead characters plunging to their deaths rather than back down on their avaricious claims; and, finally, even westerns, like the noir western The Naked Dawn, in 1955, a far more damning critique of the results of 10 years of postwar greed then say John Huston’s Treasure of Sierra Madre (1948).

The work as a whole in this period stakes a claim for Ulmer not only as a major director who worked well in all the Hollywood genre staples, the poor man’s Howard Hawkes, but also, as George Lipsitz notes, as understanding and representing the bitter disappointment that the world did not change after the war almost better than any other director. And finally, in the late ‘50s and ‘60s, his mostly forgettable late B’s where the excitement has all to do with watching Ulmer ingest at least a modicum of intelligence into miserable work for hire as in, for example, his working around Victor Mature not even phoning it in, let’s say texting it in, as a bloated Hannibal (1959) in a Warner’s late ‘50s low-budget co-production in Italy with Ulmer, in a feat on a level somewhat duplicating that of the Carthaginian general, figuring out how to get elephants across the Alps on $10 a day.

Ulmer’s early 20th Century Viennese origins--his first film, made in Vienna People on Sunday (1929) tracked the actions of three workers on a typical Sunday in a quasi-documentary answer to King Vidor’s The Crowd (1928) and was a who’s who of East European filmmakers on their way to Hollywood, with a script by Billy Wilder and co-direction by Robert Siodmak—imbued his films with a conscious attunement to the political situation, a somewhat doomed sensibility, a German Expressionist sense of the camera and the setting--he began as an art director--as the window of the soul, and a rabid interest in music, all of which served constantly as a way of enlivening his American B films as well as making them strange, of defamiliarizing them.

Thus, in the late B Beyond the Time Barrier (1960), the pilot who breaks the aforementioned barrier winds up in a future consisting of an earth devastated by a nuclear explosion and at the center of it is the leader, not a mutation as are many of the earthlings, but a rather cultured gentleman whose grey space suit cannot belie his Viennese coffee house elegance and the measured pace of his Eastern European accent. Damaged Lives, which might have been nothing more than a public address message about syphilis, instead becomes, in Ulmer’s hands, a twisted critique of the corporate head who after passing the disease on to his new wife, somewhat blithely dismisses its consequences since they have been told it can be cured in a few years. She, though, consumed with shame, in a scene foreshadowing the disenchantment with the optimism of the American dream which will be the subject of Detour, turns the gas on in the apartment and lies down beside her sleeping husband, content to kill them both. The film has a happy ending sustaining the can-do ingenuity of the corporate head which feels quite false and which will not be repeated in the gloom of the lead character’s unredeemable misery in Detour.

Equally critical of the developing power of the American bourgeoisie is Her Sister’s Secret (1946), beginning in the old world decadence of a New Orleans New Year where the heroine is impregnated by a soldier who then departs for the war. Her sister obligingly guards her secret by taking the baby, but since the film is at least partially focalized through the viewpoint of the pregnant woman who continues to want her baby back, the sister’s and her wealthy husband’s magnanimous gesture can be read, since they cannot have children, as a selfish gesture by a class that takes what it likes.

Best of all the melodramas, and the most neglected, is The Strange Woman, in which Ulmer presents the backwoods of Banghor Maine of the 19th century as a savage place filled not with Indians but with rowdy loggers who, egged on by the town’s greedy storeowner stage their own bacchanal, more Walpurgesnacht—the medieval night when all demons appear--then backwoods Saturday night. The film follows the daughter of a town drunkard who grows up damaged but unwilling to renege her desire. She is so in touch with her own passion that she ruins two men, including the shopkeeper, and almost a third until she is finally brought down for her blatant lust, which in the American context, is often translated as a crime.

Ulmer was indeed the king of more for less, mastering the B film technique of shooting at night and using shadows to conceal the lack of budget. He was a match for that other director whose strongest work was in the Eagle Lion Bs, Anthony Mann, who in his take on the French Revolution The Black Book (1949), the title an equating of the years of the French Terror to its contemporary period of the House Un-American Activities Committee, staged the Revolution on a narrow backlot entirely at night. Ulmer’s films are similarly smart and elegant festivals of metonymy and the power of sparse lighting. In Cossacks in Exile, funded by the Ukrainian community in Canada, there is a scene where in this opera set in the 18th century, the Cossacks are forced by the Czar to flee to Turkey. In this part-for-the-whole aesthetic, we cut to one small boat crammed with really a few Cossacks at night looking through the shadows toward Turkey, or, in reality, towards Nova Scotia.

Ulmer had a Viennese love of music, directing loose musical interpretations from the Yiddish theater The Singing Blacksmith, The Light Ahead (1939), a wartime juke musical, Jive Junction (1943), and his labor of love Carnegie Hall (1947), with musicians Jascha Heifetz and Arthur Rubinstein and conductor Leopold Stokowski remaining the actual stars of a slightly fictionalized narrative around the musical space. But it was again in the Ukrainian operas Coszacks and the lesser Natalka Poltavka 1937) that Ulmer attempted, through his own editing, his montage, to illustrate the thought and feeling of the arias in a way that allowed the music to come to the forefront with the image, so that the image rather than overwhelming the music, enhances it, while still being far more than just filmed theater.

Ulmer claimed he was only ever seeking an A picture Hollwood budget, but since the work in some many different modes of production was so consistently interesting, perhaps his was a case a bit like John Garfield whose heart gave out just before he was to testify in front of HUAC, that is his heart would not let him betray his fellows. Perhaps the same was true for Ulmer whose subconscious would never let him enter the more rigid big budget world of the Dark Knight where a stultifying professionalism, devoid of politics in a conservative society and thus politically conservative, converts all passion into simple box-office gain.

You can also listen to this edition of Broe on the World Film Beat on Newsblaze Newswire.

Next up on Bro on the World Film Beat: “Cinema European et le Crise. A report on the latest victim of the financial crisis, Portuguese Cinema, which despite its featuring its own new wave and one of the most prominent of global up-and-coming directors Miguel Gomes has been entirely defunded by a right-wing, austerity-crazed, government.

Sunday, May 13, 2012

**The Koch Brothers Exposed: A conversation with eminent activist
filmmaker Robert Greenwald about his investigative documentary
addressing the enigma: Who exactly are the reactionary billionaire
brothers, where did they come from, what do they have to gain and what
can be done to stop them. And, what is the Koch connection to the Tea
Party, climate change, the Keystone pipeline, the John Birch Society,
Stalin, think tanks, front groups and buying democracy. Also, new
strategies for raising mass consciousness through movies. And finally,
does all this make Robert Greenwald a Koch-head?

**Occupy Nation: The Roots, The Spirit And The Promise Of Occupy Wall
Street. Gitlin gets it. Veteran social historian and movement chronicler
Todd Gitlin phones in to Arts Express to talk about his latest book
tracing the trailblazing movement, from its origins to its
unconventional potential as a force for social change. And sheds light
on the challenges of making the political personal, what constitutes
hope, and exiting inertia. As he probes OWS growing pains, rituals,
obsessions, inner tensions and commitment to economic justice. And how
when he first felt the intensity and scale of the movement, he knew it
was for real.

**Best Of The Net Hotspot: Mama Hope. Taking a look at African men and Hollywood stereotypes.

Stay tuned for continuing features of Arts Express: Expression
In The Arts. Airing On WBAI Radio's Pacifica Network and Affiliate
Stations. And if you'd like to
Express yourself too, you can write to: ArtsExpressradio@gmail.com

Sunday, March 18, 2012

'...I stood there, thinking at the time how much this resembled a scene from High Noon, and was moved to see a substantial show of hands. Five weeks after the attack, on May 12, 2003, several hundred people marched back into the Port of Oakland and set up a picket line at the terminal where people had been attacked and injured. Thus the First Amendment rights of the community were reaffirmed; it was an amazing experience, an amazing day to be alive...'

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The James Agee Cinema Circle is an association of national and international critics, historians and film scholars who are involved in print, radio, online and TV broadcast media and analysis.

We have come together to form the first progressive critics organization, in the belief that idealistic perspectives, voices and diverse ideological visions in film criticism that speak with social conviction and consciousness, are sorely lacking as a public platform. We will be recognizing films embodying those humanistic ideals with our annual awards.

There are so many reasons for liking or hating a movie. One big mental roadblock is being knocked out by the performances, dramatic style or cinematography, but evaluating the story as a stinker. And the typical entertainment journalist and those for sale to the commercial media corporations, will argue that if a movie is well made, it doesn't matter if the content is reactionary, degrades, or dehumanizes, or even if it is disseminating untruths about real political and historical events.

But as JACC member Louis Proyect has so succinctly pointed out, why go to such lengths to lie, when you can just simply tell the truth. And that 'why' will be one of our many probing hot topics on the table.